Google’s “Netflix Pivot” — Why Killing Search Is Good Business for Gemini

Why I think Google is happy to cannibalize search for Gemini AI subscribers.

“If you build it (a $250/mo USD subscription plan for Google Ultra), they will come ($3000/yr USD in annual recurring revenue per customer).” — Google (Original photography of Temple of Kukulcán (El Castillo) at Chichén Itzá by the author,

Dr. Derek Austin 🥳

)

As anyone who has used Google search in the past couple of years can tell you, it sucks now.

I’d love to feel obligated to say, “allegedly Google made its search product worse,” but I’ll just link you to

Ed Zitron

’s and

Cory Doctorow

’s reporting on that topic. I don’t think Google’s gonna be able to sue me for libel. 🤷

After all, it seems obvious to anyone with eyes that Google has made it much harder to find quality content online.

Whether that’s from making the ads look like regular search results, a la Bing, or throwing the world’s dumbest large language model (Bard) on top of every single search results page.

“Google Search sucks now” is now such a common opinion that is no longer even considered a hot take. (Source: Screenshot of r/google by the author

Dr. Derek Austin 🥳

. Fair Use Justification: transformative use.)

Who in their right mind can deal with Google search right now? You have to scroll, dodge the BS summary that’s always wrong, and just hope you’re not accidentally clicking an ad.

In fact, I think Google is intentionally turning their search product into something useless like Bing, and here’s…